


i've been lost, i've been found

by Cats_Dont_Float



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Adulthood, Childhood Friends, Eventual Romance, F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Moving On, Online Friendship, Past Child Abuse, Reunions, i cannot tag so i simply wont try
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28501836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cats_Dont_Float/pseuds/Cats_Dont_Float
Summary: they used to spend hours whispering about a future where they'd live together, just the four of them against the world. now, years later, dave's alone and only hears of his old friends in passing. he's living a slow, boring life, trapped in a job that barely pays and struggling to do the few things he still loves. life has hit a standstill. and then john egbert crashes back into his life with no warning and dave's life gets thrown sideways.-based on half the world away by oasis-
Relationships: Jade Harley/Nepeta Leijon, John Egbert/Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Kudos: 13





	i've been lost, i've been found

_I would like to leave this city_  
_This old town don't smell too pretty and_  
_I can feel the warning signs running around my mind_

_\------_

The bus shudders to a halt, wheels screeching over the crumbled tarmac, and Dave, half-asleep and barely in control of his painfully exhausted body, is sent reeling sideways into the dirty glass window, temple thumping into it with a resounding crack. His headphones slip from his ears to settle themselves around his neck, faint murmurings of Oasis still audible as he rubs at his head with a groan. For a second there, for what must be the first time in days, he thinks he’d almost been asleep. Beside him, the old woman who’s been not so subtly watching his incessant and mindless scrolling of Twitter the entire journey tuts irritatedly at him, and he fights the urge to shoot a signature Strider Look at her, reminding himself of the last time he’d thought it a good idea to do that. Instead he ignores her, distracted a second later by the sudden realisation of what stop the bus is at as his fuzzy vision from the impact clears and the tree beyond the dust-smeared window becomes familiar.

“Shit!” He hisses, earning himself another tut, and stumbles up to his feet, squeezing his way past the woman he knows will not take the time to stand up for him. He reaches the bus doors just before they slide shut, and stumbles out, victorious, onto the pavement beyond, leaving behind the stuffy warmth of the vehicle for the biting chill of the outside world. Suddenly, his shitty work-issue shirt feels far too thin in the winter wind, and water from the rain earlier instantly starts to seep through the holes in his shitty shoes. Dave barely registers either feeling as he traipses the all too familiar route from the edge of the road towards the looming grey tower block of apartments, already far too numb by now to the stray cats that yowl from alleys, the toppled bins that spill their contents out over his path and the staring eyes of the people who lurk around the corners of the buildings. He keeps his head down, like he always has. The walk isn’t too long, five minutes at best to get to the lobby and then to the elevator doors, and he walks it in a daze, with nothing but the tinny sound of distant music from his displaced headphones as company, only fully regaining normal consciousness once he’s leaning against the metal wall of an elevator that smells like stale piss, watching red lights flash erratically on the broken display. The glitching numbers count slowly up from 1 with each shuddering movement of the elevator, and he lets his eyes slip closed again as he waits for the overhead robot voice to announce floor 15.

There’s a girl at work, Laura, who’s always on his shifts. She’s uncanny, all too bright, too wide smiles and perfect customer service voice and the overwhelming smell of hairspray and nail polish that follows her wherever she goes. Her optimism has always been blinding, and that day he’d finally caved and asked her how she managed it, only to get himself a spiel of fawnings about the better parts of Laura’s life that kept her going through the worst shifts. If he’d known he’d have ended the day, amongst the shelves in the backroom of the store, subjected to every single photo on Laura’s camera roll of her boyfriend and the puppy they’d just bought together, he’d probably have stayed in bed that morning. Because the thing is, Dave’s got none of that. When he finally unlocks the door to his apartment and stumbles inside, he’s greeted only by a looming silence and the stack of dishes he hadn’t had the energy to wash last night. No family, no dog, no perfect house. Dave slams the door shut behind him, the usual shuddering of it on its hinges the perfect invitation into the tiny corner of hell that is his home.

The apartment is...well, it’s bad. The heating and air conditioning are both on their last legs, his neighbours on every side are too loud at all the worst times, and his balcony’s been claimed as a permanent residence for the worst-tempered pigeon Dave’s ever met. The walls are grey, the tiles in the bathroom are grey, and the carpet’s grey, though that at least might have been white once. Everything’s been grey recently; Dave’s not surprised by it anymore. He collapses down onto the broken (grey like cigarette ash) sofa he got for twenty bucks at a thrift store, throws his feet up onto the coffee table with a wonky leg he stole from the last friend whose sofa he crashed on, and tiredly seeks out his laptop amongst the sofa cushions where he abandoned it the day before. Headphones back on to drown out the central heating’s whining, he lets the screen temporarily blind him and begins his usual scrolling. Later, he’ll find nothing but ramen in the cupboards for dinner. Later, he’ll crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling for hours until the sun rises again. For now he just keeps scrolling as if Tumblr holds the answer to all his issues.

Its only a lot later than all of that, another bowl added to the growing stack of dishes and a few uneaten noodles begrudgingly tossed out the sliding doors to the smug pigeon waiting outside, that Dave sees it. A notification flashes briefly across the top of the screen, from an app he hasn’t opened up in years, and he pauses in his scrolling, half thinking he must have seen it wrong. But there it is, in his notification bar, the ugly, pixelated logo of an app he could have sworn he’d deleted months back, the two yellow people with the loudly smiling faces, the image that used to make his heart leap in his chest as a child but now just sends bolts of confusion and dread rippling through him. No one uses Pesterchum anymore, he only kept it because...Well, because those old messages aren’t backed up anywhere else, and despite what some people seem to think, he’s got a shred of sentimentality to him at least. And sure, he’s not one for answering messages these days, six ‘please, Dave, if you hear this, call me back,’ voicemails sitting unanswered on his phone and dozens more texts filling up his inbox, but the knowledge of just how few people ever used Pesterchum intrigues him. His thumb hits the notification after a solid minute of deliberation, and the world’s worst designed interface opens itself up.

Dave’s not sure what he’s expecting. A spam message, maybe, or someone sending a message to the wrong username. What he isn’t expecting is to be confronted by a username he’s been trying to forget for the last few years in a painfully familiar shade of blue, the green ‘online’ dot still lit up next to it. He shuts down the app immediately, heart jumping a few uncomfortable paces in his chest, and throws the phone aside. For a long few moments, then, he’s frozen, the only sound in the apartment the shuddering boiler and his own stumbling breathing. The last few months of his life have been the same endless cycle of routine, boring and bleak and overwhelmingly grey. He’s been waiting, he thinks, for this, wishing deep into the night for something to tear its way through the canvas of mundanity his life is painted on. He just didn’t expect it to be this. But, maybe, he wanted it to be this. Not thinking about that and ignoring his phone, he gets up and paces the short length of the living room once, twice, three times, before pausing at the balcony door.

Austin, Texas is not the world away from Houston his younger self was so certain he’d be living in by this point in his life. Looking down on the city from the window, watching lights flicker in buildings and the headlights of cars carve paths out of the darkness, its just another mass of the urban world, not so different to the view he was used to back in his old apartment beyond the curtains tattered by endless blows from swords. The truth is, as much as he’d like to imagine it, he’s not moved on half as much as he always wanted to. Dammit, he couldn’t even bring himself to leave the state after the court case, just picked up his things and moved a few cities over as if that would ever be enough. The most he’s done to leave the past behind is entirely shut himself off from his memories and pretend they never happened. But that bright sky blue, that old username, brings it back to him sharper than ever before, and as he presses his head against the glass, coolness of it sinking him back down into reality to stop an entire loss of himself to his own thoughts, he lets himself think about it for the first time in a while. Not all of it, not yet, but enough.

There were four of them. Just kids, kids let loose on the internet by careless guardians and left to find each other amongst the chaos of the thousands of webpages they trawled. Dave hadn’t expected to find friends, and certainly not to find them in three of the strangest people he’s ever met, but somehow, within a year of his twelfth birthday, he had the closest knit group of friends he could ever have wished for, and though they were scattered to what felt like the four ends of the earth, Dave had never felt that closeness before, and doesn’t think he’s felt it since. It had been over six years of friendship, though, when it all started to flake apart. The last time they spoke properly must have been years ago by now, their contact with each other having simply faded away as all the others went on to university and jobs and Dave was left behind without anything to his name. He couldn’t help the bitterness, still feels a little of it now as he thinks back to the last time all four of them had video-called, the call lasting only fifteen minutes before Jade was rushing off to a class and Rose was distracted by something or other she’d been working on writing. Like the brash and angry kid he was, he’d let the jealousy pile up on him, answering messages less and less after that until eventually he dropped out of the group all together and went back to the life of solitude he’d always planned for. He doesn’t know what happened after that, if the others even stayed friends or if they too all eventually drifted apart. Like so many things, he just doesn’t think about it.

He hears of them, though. It’s hard not to. Rose is an author (Dave had bought her first book and admittedly loved it) and he thinks he saw just recently some notification from his news app that she was engaged, maybe even married by now. Jade, of course, is the scientist she always said she’d be, or she was the last time Dave heard of her; she’s disappeared a little into reclusivity over the last year or so. And John, hardly changed in all these years, has naturally fallen into his path as a comedian, performing sell-out shows across the world and steadily building his way to massive success. His friends are bordering on famous, every single one of them, and Dave’s...trying. He’s been trying for years to achieve the goals he once had, setting his sights on smaller and smaller future aspirations with every failure and setback yet still keeping his eyes on some sort of hope, but his camera lays forgotten on his bedside table, dust coating the uncovered lens, and he’s been MIA from his photography class for so long he can only assume he’s long since been taken off the register. He’s glad he didn’t stay friends with them, if only if it means they didn’t have to see any of this. Their pity would be too much to bear.

But now, sitting on his phone on the app that connected them more than a decade back, is a message from John, as if all of this never happened, as if it’s just another day four years ago. Dave takes a deep breath, blows it out slowly to watch it condense against the glass of the balcony door, and then turns to glare at the phone abandoned on the sofa. He promised himself months ago, years even, to not think about the past anymore. But some parts of it, he thinks, aren’t so bad, maybe. Even as he stands there, he’s thinking of the long nights spent quietly whispering to video calls with his friends, listening to their laughter and their hushed promises of futures where they’d meet and live together and get away from everything they’d ever faced. They met only once all together before everything broke apart, but Dave remembers from it Jade’s smiling face, flushed red in the cold air of Washington in Winter, and Rose drifting along in long black coats and sipping coffee, and John bounding around them like an excited puppy dog. It’s that memory that sends him, smiling faintly, across his living room, back to his phone, and he scoops it up with a sigh, resigning himself to the idea that maybe some parts of the past shouldn’t always be avoided as he’s convinced himself.

The message on the screen is simple.

EB: hey uh maybe this is weird and maybe you don’t even remember me but hi dave!  
EB: it’s john by the way  
EB: how are you?

Dave stares at the message for a long, long time. John’s darkened username tells him his old friend is now offline, and he takes his time to stare at it, tracing each word carefully with his eyes. He doesn’t know how many times, in moments of weakness, he’s caved and wished for nothing more than this, for the same comfort that promises of hopeful futures used to bring him. A glance around his apartment, at the peeling wallpaper and tv he can’t afford to pay the bills for, reminds him he’s not what John’s probably expecting of his old friend, and he certainly isn’t the sort of person a rising celebrity wants to be associated with. Another glance back at the phone reminds him that John purposefully reached out to him, that for once he’s got a chance. Finally, after what feels like hours of deliberation, clicking on and off of the chat and typing and retyping a few foolish words, he sends out the one thing he can think to. A lie.

TG: hey bro been a while  
TG: s all going pretty fucking great over here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, new little fic i am trying out as a side project! i have had to post this twice because the first time i posted it it just didnt appear anywhere?? so idk if youve seen this twice im sorry, my ao3 is weird.  
> anyway, i hope you like this! ive been wanting to write some good davejohn for a while and this is like six different ideas ive had that ive smashed together so im hoping this will be good!  
> thanks for reading this if you did and i hope youll stick around for the rest of it!! - C <3


End file.
